1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sintered body of aluminum nitride with good thermal conductivity and a method for producing the same. More particularly, the present invention relates to a dense sintered body of aluminum nitride having a large coefficient of thermal conductivity of, for example, 100 W/mk or larger, improved superior electrical insulating property and dielectric property and a method for economically producing such sintered body of aluminum nitride.
2. Description of the Related Art
LSI is vigorously being improved and its degree of integration is greatly increased. To such improvement, increase of an IC tip size contribute, and calorific power per package increases as the IC tip size is increased. Due to the increased calorific power, heat radiation capacity of a substrate material becomes more important.
Since a sintered body of alumina which is conventionally used as an IC substrate has insufficient heat radiation because of its small coefficient of thermal conductivity, it cannot be accommodated with the increase of heat radiation from the IC chip. In place of the alumina substrate, a beryllia made substrate has been studied since it has good thermal conductivity. However, beryllia is highly toxic so that its handling is very troublesome.
Since aluminum nitride (AlN) inherently has a large thermal conductivity and an electrical insulating property and no toxicity, it is a highly attractive material as an electrically insulating packaging material in the semiconductor industry.
To produce a sintered body of AlN having large thermal conductivity, it is inevitable to make the sintered body highly pure and dense. To this end, several methods have been proposed. For example, Japanese Patent Kokai Publication No. 50008/1984 discloses a method comprising synthesizing AlN fine powder with high purity and molding and sintering it in conventional manners to obtain a sintered body of AlN having a coefficient of thermal conductivity of about 100 W/mk. Japanese Patent Kokai Publication No. 279421/1985 discloses a method comprising adding Y.sub.2 O.sub.3 and carbon to AlN powder containing oxygen and sintering the resultant mixture to obtain a sintered body having a coefficient of thermal conductivity of 150 W/mk.
These conventional methods require various steps for synthesis, molding and sintering, since AlN is molded and sintered after synthesis of AlN powder. Increase of the number of process steps increases not only the chance of contamination of AlN with metallic impurities, for example, grinding steps but also the cost for producing the sintered body. The cost for the production of the AlN substrate is about 100 times the cost for producing the alumina substrate. In addition, since AlN is easily oxidized in the air or with water in a solvent, a content of oxygen inevitably increases during mixing, drying and storage.
Further, the coefficients of thermal conductivity of AlN achieved by the conventional methods are far smaller than the theoretical value of 320 W/mk for AlN.